Tyrant: Shakespeare On Power
By (Author) Stephen Greenblatt
Vintage Publishing
Vintage
4th June 2019
23rd May 2019
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
822.33
Paperback
224
Width 130mm, Height 197mm, Spine 14mm
164g
An exploration of power in the plays of William Shakespeare that sheds light on our most urgent contemporary dilemmas. 'Brilliant' Sunday Times How does a truly disastrous leader - a sociopath, a demagogue, a tyrant - come to power How, and why, does a tyrant hold on to power And what goes on in the hidden recesses of the tyrant's soul For help in understanding our most urgent contemporary dilemmas, William Shakespeare has no peer. 'Brilliant, timely' Margaret Atwood, on Twitter 'A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves' Nicholas Hytner
In this brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeares tyrants and their tyranniestheir dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties, their arrogant incompetence, their paranoid viciousness, their falsehoods and their flattery hungerStephen Greenblatt manages to elucidate obliquely our own desperate (in Shakespeares words) general woe. -- PHILIP ROTH
Brilliant, timely -- MARGARET ATWOOD, on Twitter
A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves. -- Nicholas Hytner, former Artistic Director of the Royal National Theatre
Brisk and highly readable -- Jonathan Bate * New Statesman *
Brilliant -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *
Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve- How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World- How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, and has edited seven collections of literary criticism.